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Zombie Apocalypse
A zombie apocalypse is a particular scenario of apocalyptic fiction that customarily has a science fiction/horror rationale. In a zombie apocalypse, a widespread rise of zombies hostile to human life engages in a general assault on civilization. In some mythologies, victims of zombies may become zombies themselves if they are bitten by zombies; in others, everyone who dies, whatever the cause, becomes one of the undead. In either scenario, this causes the outbreak to become an exponentially growing crisis: the spreading "zombie plague" swamps normal military and law enforcement organizations, leading to the panicked collapse of civilian society until only isolated pockets of survivors remain, scavenging for food and supplies in a world reduced to a pre-industrial hostile wilderness. The Zombies Themselves Generally the zombies in these situations are the slow, lumbering and unintelligent kind first made popular in the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Recent films, however, have refeatured zombies that are more agile, vicious, intelligent, and stronger than the traditional zombie. In most cases of "fast" zombies, creators use mindless human beings (as in Zombieland and Left 4 Dead) instead of re-animated corpses to logically counter the "slow death walk" of Romero's zombies. According to a 2009 Carleton University and University of Ottawa epidemiological analysis, an outbreak of even Living Dead's slow zombies "is likely to lead to the collapse of civilization, unless it is dealt with quickly." In Max Brooks' The Zombie Survival Guide a Zombie Apocalypse would be classified as a Class 4 Outbreak. This scenario was portrayed in stunning detail in Brooks' later work, World War Z. For a variety of reasons (including those listed above, and also many having to do with our globalized, interconnected, interdependable civilization - see Modern Vulnerability). The Zombie population rose to match, possibly even exceed the human one, on a global scale. Entire cities and nations were over run with the undead, and the uninfected population had to deal with the large scale breakdown of order in a chaotic dystopia. In The Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks devotes an entire section to analyzing what measures should be taken to survive the undead world, and possible outcomes. In an interview with Ain't it Cool News, Max Brooks commented on the fans of zombie apocalypses: "I don't know what's scarier, the fact that zombies could rise or the fact there are actually people out there that can't wait for it to happen. So they can just start loading up with guns and get on their motorcycles..." Brooks also compared the interest in surviving a zombie apocalypse to people preparing for a Soviet invasion of America in the 1980s after the film Red Dawn was released. Infection and the Biological Aspect Other schools of thought on this issue involve non-undead zombies, as seen in such works as 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, the Resident Evil series, the Left 4 Dead series, the modern reboot of the Romero franchise Dawn of the Dead, and Zombieland. While these Infected Zombies are not zombies in the truest sense, they still provide the story with the same sort of mindless and bloodthirsty threat, both on an individual sense, and in a viral phenomenon that, if left unchecked, will spread to take over (and in a manner of speaking, end) the world as we know it. The Literary Perspective The literary subtext of a zombie apocalypse is usually that civilization is inherently fragile in the face of truly unprecedented threats and that most individuals cannot be relied upon to support the greater good if the personal cost becomes too high. The narrative of a zombie apocalypse carries strong connections to the turbulent social landscape of the United States in the 1960s when the originator of this genre, the film Night of the Living Dead, was first created. Many also feel that zombies allow people to deal with their own anxiety about the end of the world. In fact the breakdown of society as a result of zombie infestation has been portrayed in countless zombie-related media since Night of the Living Dead. Kim Paffrenroth notes that "more than any other monster, zombies are fully and literally apocalyptic ... they signal the end of the world as we have known it." Another main theme of the Zombie Apocalypse is the promotion of paranoia and antisocial or phobic behavior in regards to one's neighbors being out to get one's self, or 'consume' them (or what their life depends on). George Romero is often quoted as saying... :"Neighbors are scary, and when they're dead they're a bit scarier. If I did anything, maybe I came up with that guy, that form of it." Resolution The ultimate fate of humanity is rarely settled to any certainty in tales of a Zombie Apocalypse. This is partly because most Zombie works are very intimate, personal stories between small groups, and it is very difficult to effectively add the large scale military endeavor without the story becoming something else entirely. Regardless of the end result, whenever the Living Dead, or Rabid Infected rise in large enough numbers to disrupt national or global traffic and trade, that scenario is a Zombie Apocalypse.